Condors

Went out in the field for a few days last week, helped a friend who teaches desert survival classes do a course for some fellows from the National Transportation Safety Board, the guys who travel around the country and the world investigating plane crashes. Anyway, I taught a short class on wilderness first aid and helped Tony Nestor teach his basic outdoor survival curriculum. Then we went and toured the ruins at Wupatki National Monument and then Grand Canyon, where I got my first good look at the condors that were released into the wild here and few years ago and have since begun breeding succesfully in the wild.

A ten foot-plus wingspan, these bad boys were swooping and diving and soaring no more than 15 feet from me at times. At other times these were much, much farther, obviously.